The Quest for the Legends

""You didn't almost lose pretty badly," May said."

Is that a typo? Robin did actually lose, rather than almost losing.

When Robin originally asked the question, she said, "I did lose, and almost pretty badly at that, so I get it if you weren't that impressed." She's there referring to the fact that she nearly lost 2-0 (she had only Charizard left while May had Tyranitar and Floatzel, but then her Charizard managed to take Tyranitar down, despite the huge type disadvantage, and ultimately put a dent in Floatzel as well).

May is responding to that statement, saying no, that wasn't almost a pretty bad loss, that was almost a win. It's kind of a glass-half-empty situation - Robin feels she only barely scraped her way to a respectable 1-0, whereas May feels Robin was dangerously close to beating her.

Apologies for being ridiculously late as usual.

Letaligon: How is your life in Ruxido? Are you dissapointed about your father's death? Would you come back with Mark if you had the opportunity?

Letaligon: …I… I'm fine.

Mrs Grotentwoski (or whatever your middle name is): What would you say if I told you Mark is one of the 4 best trainers in Ouen this year?

Mrs. Grodski: Hmph. It looked like dumb luck, if you ask me.

Chaletwo: If you did absolutely nothing to stop the War of the Legends, who do you think would win?

Chaletwo: The legendaries' power is equalized for the War. There's no point speculating on who would win.

Mark and May: If you had a chance to become any Pokémon, which Pokemon would you choose to become? (No legendaries)

Mark: Um… One that can fly, maybe? It'd be nice to fly on my own.

May: Do I have to? I'd rather just stay as I am, thanks.

Mewtwo
how do you like chaletwo being a more powerful version of you

Mewtwo: I once thought power was the true measure of worth, but I have since realized that every life has worth in itself. Power is irrelevant. Now that I know why he looks like me, I do not fault him for it.

How do u put your pokemon personalities on?

Not a character question, but I believe you're referring to the personality test results? Take the test here, and when you get your result, it will give you a BBCode for your result image. If you click the "Edit Options" link on this site, you can paste the BBCode into your signature and it will appear at the bottom of your posts.

Haha, yeah, sometimes I'd see people expecting this fic to end super-tragically and it always kind of amused me because, yeah, I tend to be a pretty depressing writer (look at Morphic). But this story was always meant to have a pretty nice, satisfying ending, and I never felt the urge to change that fundamentally. Mark and May and Alan were always going to make it out. I only ever considered killing like two of the Pokémon. (Flygon narrowly escaped the axe here, and there was a time I was considering killing Weavile, mostly to have it established that you can't detect a Dark-type ghost. But nah, Floatzel and Weavile deserved to ride off into the sunset together.)

I'm curious though how May's life plays out after she talks to the police, though. Do you have anything thought for that / are you willing to elaborate? This specific resolution is something I've been waiting for for a while so I'm a little disappointed we don't learn more about the outcome. I recognize it's useless as far as her character arc and ending go but I'm still curious to see how the bureaucracy takes it, I guess.

That's something I really wanted to just leave open. What matters is May's decision to confess and confront what happened; establishing a canonical version of exactly how that turns out would distract from it by inviting concerns about exactly how fair/just/realistic that outcome was, and every reader would probably have a different idea of exactly what that balance should be, and I'm just not particularly interested in trying to definitively draw that line myself. As far as I'm concerned, you should imagine whatever feels right to you there.

I can tell you she definitely loses her license (but will have a chance to reapply later, and will probably get it), and that she is a juvenile and the legal system is not unreasonable. Like, she's not looking at anything horrific and life-destroying. She will be okay. She probably takes up drawing and diversifies her life a bit and eventually returns to Pokémon training as a healthier, more balanced person.

Yeah, I definitely didn't expect you to pick up on that bit just from this chapter - it's very much under the surface, and there's not really anything just in this chapter by itself that you could actually use to piece that together. But it does inform her feelings and actions here.

I just posted a short, unpolished, decidedly non-canon extra that I wrote in 2014 on my Tumblr, if you're interested! It's a random Persona 4 crossover. Of sorts. About May.

May did well in school generally, and this is a thing that's taught in school, rather than something trainers would teach themselves based on how much they care, so I'm not entirely convinced May would necessarily be particularly bad at Pokémon speech. It's a subject, she learned it like everyone else, and she's good at learning. I was bored to tears by Danish at school but I still got very good grades, and that didn't even have the kind of overlap with any of my interests that Pokémon speech has with Pokémon training. (I mean, surely it's useful as a trainer to be able to ask your Pokémon questions.)

However, in general the fic just intentionally relegates the Pokémon speech worldbuilding to the background. I've said before that I basically just want you to pretend the Pokémon are speaking English; there is never any kind of instance of a human not understanding what Pokémon are saying because of the language barrier (not even Mark's parents, who would surely have significantly less reason to know Pokémon speech than May does), because what I wanted here was just everyone being able to talk to each other. To facilitate this, there's imaginary fantasy education that makes everyone fluent in Pokémon speech, done.

In the IALCOTN I gave the Pokémon speech worldbuilding more actual presence, and in that kind of setup it'd be appropriate to play with exactly how good each given human character is at Pokémon speech. It's fairly likely I'd do something like that in the next revision. But I think it'd probably distract from May's story if she were struggling too much with the language. It's not about the language, and though it'd be nice to show she's not as good at it as Mark, I wouldn't want to have a language barrier significantly affecting her thoughtlessness towards Larvitar, or getting seriously in the way of her talking to Stantler.

(And oof, maybe I should add a spoiler tag.)